By Don Woolford
Clyde Holding was one of Labor’s nearly men.
He led the party in Victoria for 10 turbulent years without becoming premier and was a federal minister in Bob Hawke’s government for seven.
Clyde Holding (centre) at a 1975 ALP rally in Melbourne with then prime minister Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke.
But he was only briefly in cabinet and eventually lost the support of Hawke, with whom he’d been close.
Allan Clyde Holding, who died on Monday aged 80, was born in Melbourne on April 27 1931.
He graduated in law from the University of Melbourne and became a prominent practitioner in industrial law.
Holding joined the ALP as a student and, like many Victorian Labor figures of his time, cut his political teeth in the campaign against the death penalty.
He was elected to the Victorian parliament in 1962 for the seat of Richmond. In 1967, after Labor suffered its fourth straight defeat, and although a member of the right, he replaced Clive Stoneham as leader.
The 1972 election, against the ageing Henry Bolte, looked winnable, but his chances were destroyed by the dominant left. After a blazing row with state secretary Bill Hartley, he was forced to repudiate state aid for non-government schools.
Despite the Gough Whitlam-led Labor resurgent on the federal front, continued faction fighting cruelled Holding's election chances in Victoria and Bolte, exploiting Labor’s disarray, waltzed back.
Holding easily saw off a leadership challenge from Barry Jones with the remark: ‘‘Quiz kids can’t count’’.
But he lost twice to Bolte’s successor, Dick Hamer, in 1973 and 1976.
After the second loss, he resigned the leadership and the following year was elected to federal parliament for the seat of Melbourne Ports - after beating Simon Crean, son of the the retiring member and former Whitlam treasurer Frank Crean, for preselection.
When Hawke entered parliament in 1980 and started stalking the leadership, Holding was an important ally.
And when Hawke won in 1983, the new prime minister ensured Holding was elected to the ministry and made him Aboriginal affairs minister, a non-cabinet post.
Holding wanted to bring in uniform national Aboriginal land rights, and thought Hawke would support him.
But Hawke, after being lobbied ferociously by mining interests and Western Australian premier Brian Burke, dropped the proposal.
Holding held several minor portfolios until, in 1988, he was given the cabinet position of immigration and ethnic affairs.
But later that year, as part of a wider reshuffle, Hawke demoted him to arts and territories.
It was a messy, widely leaked and never fully explained blow that Holding tried to resist.
Some thought Holding hadn’t attacked John Howard aggressively enough after the opposition leader’s controversial questioning of Asian immigration.
Hawke’s version was that Holding wanted to quit the ministry in 1990, although Holding maintained that the prime minister knew this before giving him immigration.
He went to the backbench in 1990, where he stayed until his retirement in 1998.
Holding was a competent and conscientious administrator with limited persuasive skills, and a sometimes abrasive factional warrior.
An Aboriginal commentator, writing on land rights, dismissed him as ‘‘an old style, cynical Labor numbers man’’.
On the other hand, Hawke’s acerbic finance minister Peter Walsh thought Holding was far too ready to believe Aboriginal lobbyists, however dodgy their evidence.
A later Labor Aboriginal affairs minister, Robert Tickner, was probably fairest about how Holding handled the difficult job: ‘‘Ultimately, he was like all Aboriginal affairs ministers thus far, a non-cabinet minister ... invited into the inner sanctum of cabinet only for Aboriginal affairs issues where he would have been hopelessly outnumbered by the economic rationalists who had very little empathy with Aboriginal aspirations.’’
He was, perhaps, a cynic with decency.
John Button went to his first Labor state conference as an outspoken young reformist and was booed and hissed for his dissident speeches.
Holding took him aside for counselling.
‘‘I know,’’ Holding told him, ‘‘that you believe all that stuff about integrity in politics ... but that’s not the way it works.’’
Button concluded: ‘‘He was a friendly man and meant well.’’
Holding married twice - first to Margaret Sheer, with whom he had two sons and a daughter; and to Judith Crump, with whom he had a daughter.
AAP